Pockets
by Octavius
Summary: They kissed out under the sun. His hope sprang up out of the East, like golden gossamer that pumped through his veins. Ryou and Bakura. There are theives of many kinds. Chapter 5 up
1. Watch

Rating: PG-13 because of things I'm putting in later

Disclaimer: Obviously Yu-gi-oh does not belong to me. I am making no money from this.

Think of Domino like a dark fast city.

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The stitching of pockets are different than those in the rest of clothing.  Pockets are put on after the pants or the shirts of the jackets has been stitched up and put together.  Pockets are sewed on as an afterthought. The way things in them are put there for memory.

  Dried daisies from the park, fortunes from a fortune cookie, receipts, keys, mints from last summer, little forgotten things.

 He should know. He's been a connoisseur of pockets since he was 13 and had angles and cracks in his voice. They've evened out now.  He almost looks normal. 

 Normal enough or ghostly enough for him to not be seen in the crowded subways, or in the musty sidewalks of domino city. Normal enough to slip his hands into coat pockets, briefcases, a women's purse, even the front pocket of the illustrious businessman.

  It's really what he finds that makes the difference. It's a hard life and you've got to stick it out if you want to survive. He sells everything he finds.  The guilt of the items in his pockets lays heavily on his mind.  Ryou found early on that bills weighed lighter than watches and wallets.  He pawns everything as soon as possible; never goes back to the same store twice.

  It's always men in stores like those that remember. They count their money miser it out, blow cigarette smoke in his face. They've got words soaked in honey and stored away, unwrapping them carefully in front of people like Ryou.

 Hello sir.

 Think sir.

 The syllables melting off one at a time and Ryou can taste them so tangible it makes him shiver.  But he's no fool. He walks away with money in his pockets, lighter than air.

  Domino is a dead city.  Not like the ghost town way to the north with the people leaving and the cars rotting in the winter snow.  No. Domino is already dead.

  The cars never stop in the night; it's on continuous cycle of headlights and taillights outside of Ryou's window. High in the west part of town, on the edge of the dangerous alleys and crooked officials and just before the white edges and clear glass of uptown is his building. It has become a turning point and threshold of sorts.

  He only knows because Honda is a taxi cab driver, and unto them is the history and the map of the city laid out in their palms. The secret trail of taxi cab drivers Honda calls it and he laughs.

  He's never been in love. He's kissed and been kissed, and their was the artful poses and postures of love in those. He's never been in real love, never felt it open and pump through his veins.

 If Domino became a person it would be a person without a soul, untouched and layered in grime and tears.

 This is why:

 There was a man with hair as pale as his, and a suit that might have been all the silk he ever touched in the world all along the back of his arm.  It was a quiet simple breath to slip the Rolex off his wrist.

  Ryou doesn't sell this one. It's too pretty anyways with the little diamonds set all along the rim, and the soft heartbeat tick. It lays on his nightstand a beautiful piece of work off of the beautiful man with white hair and a sliver of face and nose that was like nothing Bakura had ever seen.

 But then, Ryou doesn't see that many people in a week.

 There's the shopkeeper down at the corner, and his grandson with the golden hair. He buys his groceries there because he is a creature of habit. Honda who visits off and on parks a yellow taxi at the corner and honks until he looks out the window.

 "Come on Ryou. Come on!" Honda yells down from the corner with his hat on crooked and his face flushed because Domino is always cold, or swelteringly hot.

 They drive high high uptown with the meter off and the engine running.

 It was easy to walk away after that.  The watch lingers heat into his cold fingers.  Stolen heat, like this stolen watch, he glances back again to find the man. He glances back often when he knows he shouldn't. That moment is the last moment to tuck away a memory, hide it in the pockets he has so many of inside his head.

  "Come on." Honda whispers driving the car, letting it purr out in front of them like a live beast. They're riding out between rows and rows of shoes that shine, ladies with diamond rings and pools in their backyards. They are stumbling in on their yellow steed like invaders in this holy land of perfect green lawns and pure white camellias.

 This man is sharp. He can tell by now who will run to the authorities, who will be flustered, who won't know until they get home. There's a split second, really, before he takes the watch where he knows he shouldn't be risking this. It's a dare though: building those great white houses across town, so big Ryou can't even imagine what they put inside. The risk, the dare bubbles up in his vein high enough, hot enough to overflow.  Honda slips the tiny words of his mantra out of his lips whenever they drive, "We'll step into the world of kings just for a day, just a day."

  This is in his mind when he undoes the button on the cuff before touching the watch. This is in his mind when he slips it in his own pocket and walks away down the street.

 When the man turns around and catches his eye, he thinks that maybe he already has.

 A/N: um I do mean to continue this, sorry about the weirdness, I'm kind of tired at the moment.  Yes, Ryou is a pickpocket, and the man in silk who he stole the watch from is Bakura, who will be coming back.  Some of the fragments are intentional.  If you have time please review.


	2. Mistakes

Rating: Still PG-13

Disclaimer: Yu-gi-oh does not belong to me. I am making no money from this.

Thank you to everyone that reviewed. I especially liked the Ryou plushy.

When it rains it pours. It sweeps down over the building leaving them wet and weeping, tired and sore. It's not often that Ryou opens his windows but he does when the sky drops tears, and the water creeps in under his windowsill. The air is so cold it bites his lungs and makes his fingertips stick to the glass, pulling him outside. The air after it rains is cleaner, clearer. It crushes the grime down into the sewers, scours the streets of the black dust, washes everything clean.

This Babylon, he thinks, and God is going to drown us out.

The watch sits on the bedside table, whispering to him, ghosting him along with secret words he cannot quite hear. They are the slight deaf tones between an object and it's owner. It's colder than the air outside when he touches it, lets his fingers fall gracelessly against the crystal surface. The gold winks up at him like so many eyes knowing this is just barrowed time.

I don't know you.

He says it clear concise makes to move away from the unwelcome hand on his shoulder. He's never known anyone of course. How can you delve into a person and pick them apart? How can you know someone?

But this is someone indeed. He's got words in his mouth, swift strong words. The kind that coax and coalesce to form threats in elegant boundaries. Ryou could see them burgeoning on his tongue when he opened his mouth waiting to be sprung forth.

And I don't know you.

But Ryou knows this man. The sharper jut of the jaw, the nose cut longer, the tensile strength of the hands, the hold and dive of the eyebrows -- and oh, dear God he knows those eyes.

He can always memorize a face. In his mind he's got rows and rows of faces and noses, cheeks and eyes. He's got to remember, he's got to know when to turn away from the woman with the red handbag, and the pristine rubies in her ears, or duck down an alleyway when the man with the eagle nose swoops down the sidewalk. He's known Honda for years and years, and can tell by now the easy lines of his face after he's been with a woman, the tense curve of his neck after he's been drinking, and the clench in his teeth when he's steeling himself for uptown roads.

It's the names that catch him. Names stick in his throat, or glance off him once he's been introduced. He can meet someone years later after meeting them once and know their face, point out a scar. But when they recognize and call out his name, he can't say theirs back.

But this man is different. Whatever name has been given to him he'll remember.

I think you have something of mine.

No.

What's your name?

James.

Do you expect me to beleive that?

Michael.

Raphael.

Hikari.

What's in a name? A lie, a truth. Your parent's aspiration for you. A jumble of words to separate him from him and her from her.

Hikari?

Real names were a whispered word, something only the bearer knew.

Then I'll be Yami.

Because a true name could be used for control, by demons, and powers, and human nature.

Yami knows and Ryou knows.

He can call the police and they'll come and charge down the alley, find the watch on the bedside table counting down his time. It will do back to the man who calls himself darkness and be returned to its place caved under the cuff of his jacket. Ryou will sit in jail and the clock on the wall will hum to itself and there will be no more barely tangible whispers.

This is how it goes: The Yami doesn't reach for a phone, but tips Ryou's chin with his cold cold hands to look him in the eye. And Ryou can paint out the lines of this man's face and the tight bruised shadows under his eyes, the pale stretched look that only the uptown gentry contract when they are dying in their plastic life.

When Ryou break away there's thunder clamoring above up in the clouds, and then the rain begins to wash down in sheets that wrap him up and soak him to the bone. It's a long walk back to his apartment and the water is seeping into the flimsy soles of his shoes. So when a car pulls up next to him he gets inside. It's a quiet drive. He watches the water bleed off his clothes and into the leather of the seats, the man driving doesn't look at him.

Why are you doing this?

I was like you once.

He's had his share of mistakes: Loving all the wrong parents, making all the wrong choices, doing all the wrong things. Afterwards he knows. It's an ache in his stomach growing inside him and gnawing away, climbing up to sit on the bottom of his ribcage. His regret swung slow and steady as he let his father drink and said nothing. It burned and clawed as his mother left. It ate him inside out after he started stealing. It presses tiny shivering fingers behind his solar plexus when he opens his window and watches the black car speed away.

A/N: I'm sorry I know this is kind of weird (again). This chapter was also written rather badly…Um yes we will get to call him Bakura sometime soon. I know I don't use quotation marks, but this wasn't really the kind of story for quotations. Some are the fragments are intentional, some are due to my bad grammar. I know Ryou and Bakura are a little OOC, but I'm trying to make them a bit more human. However Bakura will have plenty of a chance to be angry and mean. So…Please please review and I hope you liked it.


	3. stirrings

Rating: Still PG-13

Disclaimer: Yui-Gi-oh is not mine, never has been, never will be. I'm making no money from this.

Thanks for the reviews. Puts both plushies on her desk where they glare at her for being late

It was not without doubts that he went. He could wait out on those windswept streets, with doubt gnawing inside his stomach, black cars printed in the corners of his eyes, the back of his eyelids. He can close his eyes and see pale hair and thin bladed nose, he can feel a hand on his shoulder, breath on his face, doubt stillborn inside him.

He cannot take anymore, the pockets are closed to him his mind else where his hands to himself. To pick a pocket one requires a cool, a calm. A calm he lacks now. Every minute is lived on edge for the man who calls himself darkness.

Ryou sits in his room, stares at the lion growing in his peeling wallpaper. The curve of it's tail closes around him trying to drag at him with it's symbolic courage, the claws a darker shade of the wood underneath. If he reached out to touch it he knows it would be only glue and wood, a water stain over his wall, but from here behind his black car eyes he can see it and hear it's roar in the distance like the cars racing down their streets.

He thinks reality is like this: squinting at things behind a veil, until it is drawn away. Maybe he's been hiding all these years in his apartment, quiet, away from the strangers who passed his windows, his hands stealing into their pockets, their purses into their own half dreams.

The watch is colder than cold. His fingertips brushing it, a mist fanning out passed his nails speeding before him, the edges sly and hard. If he puts it to his ear he can hear he seconds counting down since the last time he saw him.

Stick shift, brake pedal, bumper shining in the dim of domino. Ryou thinks Yami can drive with his eyes closed, with elegance and grace still dancing on his shoulders. It's a moment until he passed the threshold of uptown that you realize. Then it's those white white houses, and hills, and palm trees, and lawns hat are greener than green. You breathed on the window and knew that it would turn to crystal in this place that shone like the sun.

You play chess and win. You play chess and watch his hands. You play chess in a house that is all sharp edges and black marble, thin plants molded with wire and money, diamond glasses that you've seen him smash from time to time.

He asks you if you're old enough to drink, you say:

Just.

He says: 21 and gives you a look.

When I was 21 my father had already married a younger woman, I was graduating from Yale, and my mother had never stopped crying.

I'm sorry.

Why should you be?

3 days pass like this:

He plays chess, he listens to his stories in front of the fireplace, he tells him some of his own, he sits in his marble house, Ryou fell asleep there and woke up with the sun tangoing across his collar bones and scraping its heels. Ryou gets drunk. He get's drunk. Ryou tells him about his father who could have played the keys off a piano, and his mother who fell in love with a musician and ran off with a nameless business man. Ryou tells him all these things and feels something trickling into your heart. Things that might be the stirrings of something else, something as strange and elusive as the freckles of firelight in the Yami's eyes, and the thundercloud of emotion that stills and wipes itself away when Ryou catches his reflection.

Behind that veil he's become reckless, filled with that slight tightening of his chest, the breath he can't breathe. He drove up with him to the top of a hill, flooring the car, engine roaring under like the lion on his wall. They are drunk, Yami smokes. Iron red out under the moon. Ryou kisses him like he's spun thin and falling in love, with his fingers curling in his hair, and a hand at the base of his neck.

A/N: erm sorry about the wait, this is the first day since Jun 28 I've been home for 24 hours. Went to England. Anyways I decided to make Ryou a little older than I had originally envisioned him, I always imagine Bakura older, I suppose Bakura's in the 25-27 age range here. Um yes their relationship is um burgeoning here? Sorry this was written rather sloppily and kind of mediocre, I'll do better next time. Please review


	4. Powder thoughts

Rating: Still PG-13, it might change depending on the type of relationship that we decide on.

Disclaimer: Yui-gi-Oh is not mine, I'm making no money from this, never have.

Thanks lilmatchgirl007, I hope I don't disappoint you, about the angst... this was originally intended to be much darker, so some angst may reappear I'll try not to make it cliché though.

The fragments and repeats are (supposedly) intentional.

Things open up for Ryou when they shouldn't. People begin to recognize him again, step aside to let him pass, push him, pull him, dance inside their street foxtrot circle.

Try not to step on their black polish shoes.

He has always lived in those back alley out of the way spaces. The places people don't stand, don't look, don't watch or hear. But suddenly he's been pushed out into the sunlight. It hits his face; warm, utterly warm.

Almost as warm as the little room at the back of Hou Chinn's where he plays poker with Honda on Friday night. Honda's brought someone with him this time, her powdered arm around his neck; pale. Ryou thinks she'd be smoother than powdered flowers, the fine chalk dust leaking off the blackboard. She's at odds with Honda, mussed hair, coat collar turned up. Smoke furls up from him and ashes falling in the hem of clothing. The men across the table smoke, Ryou does after an afterthought, after remembering the fine angled hands of Bakura, and that was his name.

He saw it flashing gold on a little plaque on the door. When he worked up the courage, desperation, to climb into the office of hard cut edges, of papers and words ready to slit his throat.

Barbarism and business go together he thinks.

The workers stared and even their perfectly pressed shirts and glinting gold cuffs laughed softly at him. But they smiled a little. Assumed he was a poor brother, a cousin, some lone family relation wandering in with that pale pale hair.

He looked at him. He looked at him. He has eyes bluer than the dress of the secretary outside, and sharper than all the little pointed ink teeth embedded in all the papers downstairs. Under him. Over him. Beside him. So he kissed him across the desk and thought.

And thought of Honda's girl in the lamp-heat poker room, with her powdered arms and powdered cheeks. Her spring flower lips when she leaned out from her perch and kissed him with her fingers under his chin, tilting up. He thought of the breath that slipped through her lips and stole through his. It became a tiny ache inside him, like swallowing the wind.

Slam, blam, wham! Three royals on the table flickering up to him in blues and reds, yellow swords fading in with the dinghy room. It's so hot he's sweating. And he's deathly afraid he'll smear the powder on her forearm, on her wrist where it's bent under his face.

So hot.

But there had been a time, after that, in the cool stone house. There, Bakura had opened his mouth to the inside of Ryou's bare knee; moved upwards. He thought his bones would melt in the furnace of his body. He'd thought he'd crumble and break apart.

He thinks of all this in that brief heartbreaking moment of lips on lips.

He thinks of Honda's spun flower lady and her light kiss that asked nothing from him.

He thinks of Bakura's which asks for everything.

A/N: Can you tell I was spacing happy? Yeah anyways... don't worry Ryou's not going to have an affair, can't say the same for Bakura though... if you catch any stray "you"s instead of "he"s it's because octavius thinks in "you"s and then changes them to "he"s later, and that she was tired/ being lazy...erm well...please review!


	5. summer

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Not mine

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_Ryou would look back at that dream summer many times over the course of his life._

This is how summer goes:

Sidewalks crack and they retar the streets of downtown sticky and black like crushed bones and oil. The window sill splinters, dust motes collect and dance on Ryou's empty bed. The apartment reeks of absence –like the insides of tombs, the emptiness inside waiting mouths- of a season lived somewhere else.

Things are grabbed off the table, taken out of drawers, stuffed into bags, haste in all his movements and joy lifting up out of his body.

The sun is reawakening pulling itself out of its rain-cloud sheets and winter rest.

Doors are locked; the room is left alone, with the dust, with the last untidy streaks of joy.

They take a boat out across the dock. He sits behind him; hair as pale as the sea foam. They head for the sea. The wild waters come up to kiss the edges of the boat, the tips of Ryou's fingers. An island far far away from the dark city with its little white cottage shutters, and windows, and the tuberoses in the back that are blooming just as they arrive at dusk. He can smell them so heavy on the summer air, the breath of angels.

Bakura turns. Bakura turns and looks, and Ryou knows. They shut the door and kiss in the long piece of shadowed hallway with Bakura's fingers fitting all along his ribcage, mouth ghosting over collarbones. Tongue and cheek.

The white house, the white walls, and the one picture of sailing. The waves in the picture blue as the sky and crashing out unbound over the prow, the little figure of a person looking out to the horizon where the sea meets the sky.

All Ryou does is look and love. Bakura kisses like rain, like that intangible "good" you feel when you are a child. Ryou presses his lips to his with ice in his mouth, and Nectarine on his tongue. They've been: in the sea, in the sand, against the white wash walls of the little house, in the bed with wind brushing up their bodies like gossamer, or a lover's touch.

When the talk they're quiet. The breeze steals their words and brings them to the other's mouth. They are afraid they'll shatter this white-sand heaven surrounded by the sea, or the fragile threads between them. They build bonfires dance and laugh under Taurus, Gemini, Lyra.

Ryou shows Bakura constellations with their backs in the sand, tracing lines from one star to the other, kissing the inside of this wrist when they're done, and not wanting anything else.

How do you know?

I used to lie out on my roof and find them, wish for change.

The alarm clock rings at 6:00 a.m. every morning, and he gets up to watch the sun rise out of the East; warm and golden inside him.

Ryou's holding all his hopes inside him, afraid to breathe out and let them go, afraid they'll break like spun glass and dreams. But Bakura is infinitely confident, if he touches Ryou's cheek he can feel it trickle inside.

I think I'm in love with you.

You think a lot of things.

He lights a cigarette. Two quick movements, turn of the head. Fire sitting at the end of his fingers.

I mean it.

Bakura breathes out. The smoke casts a shadow over the stars, and their blanket of dark. He sees Ganymede far far off flickering out of the corner of his eye.

I know, I know.

Ryou takes the cigarette from him, flicks it out into the ocean. They watch it on the surface of blue glass, flicker within the waves.

The roses bloom heavy behind the white house –so heavy they've got candy cane stems- Ryou leans in and pulls kisses from the man before him, this god of summer.

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A/N: Lilmatchgirl007- I know this isn't quite the type of action you were looking for, but something much more major will happen next chapter, but err... their relationship kind of goes in stages. I kind of wanted them to go to Venice, but that seemed too far outside the borders of the yu-gi-oh world.


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